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Monday, June 16, 2014

The University of Cape Town (UCT) recently did some research for the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) which showed that 67% of South Africa’s youth believe that the government is the best way to earn a good living. Big brother has really done his job admirably to get the youth of the nation to the point of thinking that their chances are best when employed by the government!

The issue with this idea is that government should never be a nation’s primary job supplier. It simply cannot be. It is an entity that produces nothing! Unless, of course, the South African government moves over to a socialistic model, or even worse, communism. That is not very unlikely when it is considered that some of the ministers in government have strong ties to the South African Communist Party (SACP)! When the government becomes the biggest provider of jobs, it will have to raise taxes to be able to provide the salaries for those jobs. Since it produces nothing, raising taxes can only go so far before they will have to move over to a communistic model, meaning that private ownership, private businesses and more will come to an end, and the government will end up owning everything, producing everything and no-one will have the incentive to better themselves.

Government’s job is to govern, and to ensure that services are supplied that make running homes and businesses most effectively. Government must come up with policies that make it easy for businesses to grow and become job suppliers. When a government’s policies restrict businesses to become primary job suppliers and entrepreneurs to be successful, then it is failing in one of its primary purposes.

Big government is not a good idea, since a nanny state is not interested in the welfare of its people, but in how those people could be kept in line.

The kicker of the research done by UCT is the fact that 61% of the youth that were surveyed thought that starting your own business means that you have to work too hard to be successful. This already tells me that the youth are clearly in the pockets of this government even at this age. The government has already created a culture of hand-outs, and when a government starts giving something to people, to take it away later becomes almost impossible. Of course, the youth now expect the government hand-out policy to continue when it comes to jobs. Do they even realize that you don’t simply walk into a government office and get handed a well-paying job?

With this attitude in the minds of the youth, we have to turn to our education and wonder what they teach the kids in the state high schools. We already know that the quality of South Africa’s maths and science education is so bad that it places last out of 148 countries. That puts us behind countries like Haiti, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, etc. It is seriously not a stretch of the imagination to think that we do not do much better in other areas of our education.

With an education of this pathetic level. no wonder our youth think that the government is the best option as a provider of jobs.